In 2014, one of my goals is to update this blog on a semi-regular basis (every week? Every two weeks? We’ll see how it goes). I’m starting here by outlining some topics that I hope to cover with the help of guest bloggers in the next few months.

Part of this effort will involve expanding our guest bloggers to include anonymous writers, so that we can try to cover some of these issues with greater honesty. Many people have approached me to say that they want to write something, but have said they are afraid to speak their truths online. I hope that this blog will provide these important voices with some writing space soon. (If you haven’t contacted me yet with an idea because you have been hesitating to put your name on something, I hope that you will take this as an open invitation!).

By Jacob RemesWilliam Lyon Mackenzie King Research Fellow, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University Assistant Professor of Public Affairs and History, SUNY Empire State College

One
I have a friend who is a star. At a conference panel recently, half of the people in the standing-room-only room left after she was done, and those who stayed directed all their questions to her at the end. Her first book has become a textbook and a landmark on graduate student exam reading lists. Not only that, but she and her partner are both tenured in at a research intensive university ranked in the top 60 national universities by US News. In short she seems like she’s won the game. She has the job most of us imagine, or are trained to imagine, that we want. Her ideas are well known, recognized as important, and spreading. Her book sells.

It appears I’ve reached new heights in multi-tasking. There are laws that prohibit talking on your cell phone while driving, but as far as I know there’s no law against talking into a micro-recorder. So here I am today, driving to Halifax for a conference and I’ve got five hours ahead of me so I figured I’d dictate this blog. Multi-tasking is, of course, something we’ve all learned to do, especially those of us who have kids.

“Happiness is consistently described as the object of human desire, as being what we aim for, as being what gives purpose, meaning and order to human life. … Do we consent to happiness? And what are we consenting to, if or when we consent to happiness?”

In her book The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed writes about happiness from a position of what she calls “skeptical disbelief in happiness as a technique for living well” (3). Her premise is to critically consider how happiness is imagined as “what follows a certain kind of being” and becomes associated with “some life choices and not others” (The Promise ofHappiness, 3). She questions, in other words, how the wish for happiness is based on value-laden ideas and actually functions in a state of continual crisis as one experiences the constant disappointment of not accumulating enough of it. She helps us to question how we might uncouple happiness from such values as wealth, marriage, and social status. What if one chooses to pursue work that does not pay well, for example, because of the intellectual stimulation that it promises? If this choice produces financial difficulty, is one choosing not to be happy, as a result? The notion of choosing happiness is a problem, Ahmed argues, because “the demand for happiness is increasingly articulated as a demand for a return to social ideals, as if what explains the crisis of happiness is not the failure of the ideals but our failure to follow them” (The Promise ofHappiness, 7).